A video from NASA and GISS shows the earth’s surface temperatures and how they’ve changed since 1884. Just watch what happens around the 1980s!
*
An English 101 teacher says: There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.
*
It must be allergy season. This panda can’t stop sneezing!
*
How to make your eye feel like it’s closed, when it’s actually open. This is why pirates wore eye patches, for instant night vision. Let us know if it works for you.
*
A 3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica. Cool effect, and the subject matter is more anguished than ever.
*
The Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products. Here is everything a coyote might ever need to catch a roadrunner.
*
MUTO, an awesome graffiti animation. This must have taken forever to put together.
*
Fetus in fetu. One of the weirdest things ever removed from a human body is… a human body! Believe it or not, it’s happened again.

My dad was a military brat - my grandpa was in the Navy so my dad found himself uprooted a few times. He was born in Virginia but ended up in Iowa where he decided to stay put. Although he doesn’t quite make the list of famous people (sorry, dad), these brats do:

10 Famous Military Brats

1. Photographer Annie Leibovitz’s father was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
2. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe’s dad was in the U.S. Army.
3. Actor Tim Curry (one of my favorites) traveled quite a bit with his dad, who was a Chaplain in the Royal Navy.
4. Xuxa, a Brazilian Icon who is sometimes called “The Madonna from South America”, was quite worldly at a young age. Her father, who was in the Brazilian military, wasn’t stationed in one place (Rio de Janiero) until Xuxa was seven.
5. Michael J. Fox was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and didn’t settle in one place until his dad retired from the Canadian Forces in 1971.
6. Elton John comes by his musical talents honestly - his dad was a trumpter with the Royal Air Force Band.
7. Bruce Willis was born in Iber-Oberstein, West Germany. His father was a soldier in the U.S. Army and met his mother while stationed there.
8. Emmylou Harris’s dad was a Marine Corps pilot who went missing in action in Korea in 1951. He was a prisoner of war for for somewhere between 10 and 16 months (different reports say different things) before he was released and sent home.
9. Michelle Bachelet, the President of Chile, was born to an archaeologist mother and a father who was a Chilean Air Force Brigadier General. She moved all around Chile, and spent two years in Maryland while her father was serving at the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C. They then moved back to Chile where Michelle graduated high school.
10. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, moved numerous times because of his dad’s career with the U.S. Navy. Although he started high school in Annandale, Virginia, he graduated from Nile C. Kinnick High School in Japan. And then he went on to save the world from his evil father. No, wait, I’m confusing fantasy and reality again…

As baseball season cranks up, so will talk about hardball’s various paranormal activities. This year will likely feature more talk than ever about the Curse of the Billy Goat, the hex that’s supposedly played a role in the Chicago Cubs not winning the World Series in a century. The Billy Goat and Babe Ruth aren’t sports’ only prominent ghosts, though. Here are a few spooks that might not have frightened you yet.

1. Eddie Plank

Plank was Major League Baseball’s first left-handed pitcher to win 300 games, and he ended his illustrious career in1917 with an impressive 326 victories against just 194 losses. You’d think all that pitching would have made him eager to move on to other endeavors, but apparently not. Although Plank passed away in 1926, he’s still trying to pitch.

In 1996, the Hall of Famer apparently got the urge to start pitching again. In the middle of the night, the owner of the Gettysburg, PA, house where Plank had died heard a repetitive series of noises. A man would grunt, then there would be a thud and the sound of footsteps. Apparently, Plank was launching pitches to a catcher, who would occasionally have to chase down an errant toss. The owner determined that not only must the noises have come from Plank’s ghost, but that the “ball” was traveling sixty feet, six inches, exactly the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate in baseball. The noises supposedly stopped within a month of the first pitch, possibly because ghosts play a shorter season than living baseball players.
(more…)

The public radio show This American Life has just begun its second season as a TV program on Showtime. If you’re not watching, you’re missing out. (Or you can’t afford Showtime — and you can’t be blamed for that.) But today you can get a little free content from the show, in the form of an animated segment that hasn’t aired yet.

But first, a little more about the new season. To mark the beginning of its second season on TV, TAL hosted a live event in movie theaters around the US — though for those of us on the West Coast it was tape-delayed by three hours. The show consisted of a live performance of the radio show by Ira Glass in front of a theater audience, filmed and simulcast to movie theaters. It was an interesting format, combining stage show (with various guests and interactive bits, including questions from the audience) and radio show, and even showing Glass flubbing a few cues as he mixed the music and interview clips live.

One of the best pieces shown that night was an animated segment by Chris Ware and John Kuramoto, illustrating a story that originally appeared on the radio show some time back. In the segment, NPR’s Robert Krulwich (whom you may know from Radiolab) and his wife tell a story they’ve been telling all their married lives…then talk about which one of them has it all wrong.

Although this segment won’t hit Showtime until June 1 (in the fifth episode of the second season, “Every Marriage is a Courtroom”), you can watch it now:

See also: This American Live Season 1 on iTunes. ($10.99 in the US for the six-episode season.)

Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, this game is simple. We’ll give you a name, you choose if it’s a skin disease or a character from the realm of Dungeons and Dragons. You shouldn’t need a sixteen-sided die or a medical dictionary, though the latter may not hurt. Get all 16 right and you’re essentially qualified to be either a dermatologist or a dungeon master, so pretty much all doors are open.
Take the quiz.

We don’t usually cover straight-up news as such here on the floss, but this particular item was so out there — and so geeky at the same time — I just couldn’t let it fall through the cracks. For the first time ever, Vatican astronomers have admitted the possibility — even the probability — of intelligent life on other planets. Vatican official Father Gabriel Funes, a respected astronomer in his own right, released an article titled, literally, Aliens Are My Brother, detailing various extraterrestrial scenarios as they relate to Christian theology. He compares the potential multiplicity of life forms in the universe to that here on Earth, and goes on to speculate that such alien life forms could even be “free from Original Sin … [remaining] in full friendship with their creator.” (In short, expect to hear lots more conspiracy theories about how Jesus and the angels were aliens in the near future.)

But it’s not just the Catholic Church that has aliens on the brain — also this week, the British government released years’ worth of newly-declassified documents pertaining to UFO sightings in British airspace. “The Ministry of Defence does not deny that there are strange things to see in the sky,” one internal memo explains, “but it certainly has no evidence that alien spacecraft have landed on this planet.” (Suuuure, guys.) You can check out the newly-released records here, the most hilarious bits of which, in our opinion, are the vigorous and exceedingly formal tiffs between various dukes, lords and viscounts in the British House of Lords regarding UFOs, like this one:

Viscount Long: My Lords, if the Noble Earl is suspicious that the Ministry of Defence is covering up in any way, I can assure him … the sole interest of the MoD in UFO reports is to establish whether they reveal anything of defence interest.
Lord Wynne-Jones: My Lords, does the Answer given mean that since there has been a Conservative Government the UFOs have done a U-turn and departed?
The Earl of Kimberley: My Lords, as my noble friend said that 600 UFOs had been officially reported or acknowledged by the MoD in 1984, may I ask him how many of those sightings still remain unidentified?
Viscount Long: My Lords, we do not have the figures. They disappeared into the unknown before we got them.
Lord Hill-Norton: My Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount whether or not it is true that all of the sighting reports received by the MoD before 1962 were destroyed because they were deemed “to be of no interest”? And if it is true, who was it who decided that they were of no interest?”
Viscount Long: My Lords, my reply to the noble and gallant Lord — I was wondering whether he was going to say the the Royal Navy had many times seen the Loch Ness monster — is that since 1967 all UFO reports have been preserved.

Conspiracy/comedy gold!

With most of the artists I discuss in “Feel Art Again,” there are so many great works of art available that it’s hard to decide which painting to include in the post. I’ve rounded up 5 such artists who really deserve a second exhibition.
(more…)

The National Woman Suffrage Association was formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 139 years ago today. To mark the anniversary, Chris Connolly is here to discuss the role of the bicycle in the women’s movement.
Susan B. Anthony once said, “I think [bicycling] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” A woman on a bicycle, the equal rights champion observed, presents “the picture of free and untrammeled womanhood.”

Susan and her fellow 19th-century women had been severely trammeled their entire lives. Forget the glass ceiling; women in those days were trapped under the glass floor. Battles like “equal pay for equal work” were decades away. The Victorian woman’s cause was more along the lines of, “We’d like to leave the house, sometimes … please … if it isn’t too much trouble.”

The fashion for women at that time tended toward helplessness and frailty. Consider the image of a Victorian lady: She’s sickly and pale, relies on men for everything, and occasionally peeks out from behind an ornamental fan (usually before touching her wrist to her forehead and fainting). The frailty of a “lady” was such that preventing females from studying, working, voting and doing much of anything at all seemed a rational measure.
(more…)

I’ve always been fascinated with the psychology of twins and their relationships. Today’s Brain Game is a “related” riddle (pun intended) that we hope you’ll enjoy:

Click here for the answer.

Amputee animals have a hard life. In the last few years, more and more disabled creatures of different species are being helped by modern technology, and by the researchers and volunteers who go the extra mile.

Fuji’s Rubber Tail

Fuji is a dolphin who lives in an aquarium in Okinawa. A mysterious illness in 2002 caused her tail to rot, and it was amputated to stop the spread of the disease. Without a tail, a dolphin can’t swim. Engineers from Bridgestone Tire Company worked to design a new rubber tail for Fuji. The first designs did not work properly or had some other drawback. Finally, Fuji accepted the third tail design, made of silicon rubber with a foam padding, and was able to swim almost as well as an intact dolphin.

Uzonka and Beauty and their New Beaks

When a bird’s beak is damaged, it may not be able to eat, drink, or hunt properly and could die as a result. Uzonka the stork had her bill damaged by human assault. She received a prosthetic beak after five preparatory operations and is in the care of an animal hospital in Uzon, Romania.

Beauty is an Alaskan bald eagle whose beak was shot off several years ago. She was found in 2005, unable to properly hunt or eat. She was taken to a refuge, but her beak did not grow back. Beauty will receive a nylon-composite beak next month. A new beak attached with screws would enable her to hunt, but the animal experts in charge of the surgery decided against it, because the screws would have to be dangerously close to her eyes and brain. Instead, her prosthetic beak will be attached with glue. Beauty must stay in human custody, where she will be fed and protected.

(more…)